Abstract
Low back injuries and low back pain are often caused by improper task execution, overuse or lack of guidance and training. Our current understanding of dose-response relationships between risk factors that contribute to these injuries remains unclear. Enhanced monitoring of risk factors contributing to injuries could provide more complete exposure-response information. It is difficult to continuously monitor workers and their exposures to ergonomic risk factors using existing technologies. This paper presents a practical approach to advance continuous measurements of common risk factors by quantifying the weight of an object during lifting and carrying, lift frequency and lift duration during manual material handling (MMH). We estimate these parameters based on the ground reaction forces (GRF) and considering trunk dynamics. The results show that by considering trunk dynamics and applying simple signal processing techniques, we can precisely estimate these risk parameters. These parameters can then be used to estimate injury risk of workers. The developed methodology is designed for real-time continuous monitoring applications and sets the foundation for future development of in-field monitoring of workers with wearable sensors.
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Acknowledgement
Research reported in this publication was supported in part by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health of the National Institute of Health under award number T420H008414-11.
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Trkov, M., Merryweather, A.S. (2019). Estimation of Lifting and Carrying Load During Manual Material Handling. In: Bagnara, S., Tartaglia, R., Albolino, S., Alexander, T., Fujita, Y. (eds) Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018). IEA 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 825. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96068-5_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96068-5_17
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